Justin Vaughn
Class of 2028
Contact
- Email: jtvaughn@andrew.cmu.edu
In This Section
- Academics
- Admissions
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News
- 2025 MSCF Trading Competition
- A New Academic Year at MSCF
- Alumni Reflect on the MSCF Program’s 30th Anniversary
- Breaking Barriers, Building Leaders: Women in Quant Finance
- Data Science in Finance
- Financial Engineering Salary
- High Stakes and Fair Values: CMU Students Face Off in the 2026 Market Making Game
- How to Become a Quant
- Introducing the MSCF Quantitative Assessment
- MSCF 30th Anniversary Celebration
- MSCF Advisory Board Member, Roni Israelov receives the 2024 Peter L. Bernstein Award
- MSCF Hosts 2025 Panel for Women in Data Science Pittsburgh
- MSCF Hosts 2nd Annual Datathon: Advancing Experiential Learning and Industry Connections
- MSCF Welcomes Rhonda Khan as Communication and Leadership Instructor and Coach
- MSCF Welcomes Shelli Faber as Associate Director of Career Services
- Quantbot Classroom Naming
- Squarepoint Foundation Deepens Partnership MSCF Through $100K Gift to Support Future Leaders
- Our Community
- Student Experience
Biography
LinkedIn Profile
Why would a former premed student switch to computer science, then to quantitative finance? Each step followed the same path: applying models, data analysis, and machine learning to find structure in complex systems. Markets turned out to be the system I most wanted to understand. I am focused on quantitative research and portfolio analysis. I majored in Computer Science and minored in Statistics & Data Science at Carleton College, a top-ten liberal arts college in the US. I worked mostly in Python and R in my coursework. In a project for my Optimization class at Carleton, I built Mean-Variance (MV) and Mean-Absolute Deviation (MAD) portfolio optimization models, and confirmed my hypothesis that MAD optimization is more robust for real-world data that deviates from normality.Undergraduate electives in Econometrics and Behavioral Economics have shaped how I think about modeling market behavior and why mispricings occur. Outside of finance, I train seriously as a bodybuilder. It has taught me to measure inputs carefully, stay patient, and let consistent effort compound into steady results, the same approach I’ll strive to bring to research and modeling. I would appreciate the opportunity to connect and talk about the research problems your team is working on.